


Import/Export

by karanguni



Category: The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Genre: Gen, random guest appearances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 14:09:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5459252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a fucking corn field, he realised. They put me in the middle of a fucking corn field.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Import/Export

**Author's Note:**

  * For [probablylostrightnow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/probablylostrightnow/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

He hadn't intended it to make that little of a splash.

The problem with the Culture was that it could do many things - could do almost _anything_ , according to the wrong people - but the one thing they seemed categorically incapable of was resisting the temptation to over-engineer. Zakalwe didn't have a _problem_ with that, most of the time - he liked his FYT suits and his big damn guns - but for fuck's sake, this planet'd just barely finished patting itself on the back for inventing _electric ground vehicles._

'Wasn't supposed to do that,' Zakalwe said to himself as he stood, sopping wet, on the edge of a bridge. The bridge in question hadn't offended him in any way; solid construction job there, did good work connecting bank A to bank B and all that.

The groundcar currently floating, quietly and without any fuss, in the middle of the river, though: _that_ was annoying. When Zakalwe had flung it in there he'd expected it go bubbling, sink like lead, and end up offensively difficult to get out again. Since there were two bodies that'd once belonged to people whom other people would notice were missing in back of said groundcar, Zakalwe'd been rather banking on that particular eventuality.

'You stupid assholes,' Zakalwe said. 'You stupid, safety-obsessed _gits_. You couldn't build something to native tech spec?'

The car bobbed on a current, obstinately buoyant.

Zakalwe glared at it. 'I needed to get _rid_ of you, not-' He cut himself off, and sighed. The water wasn't exactly warm, this time of year, but it wasn't like he had another option. Zakalwe stripped out of his dripping wet shirt and dumped it, resigning himself to one more swim.

'You could've just, I don't know,' he said one final time to the vehicle, just before limbering up to dive. 'Blown yourself up or something.'

Astonishingly and very obligingly, the car blew up.

* * *

The worst part was that they didn't even bother to send Sma when the time came for Lord Erinde, who'd so recently survived a bomb plot on his private vehicle by two anti-regency fanatics (who'd in turn blown themselves up; what karmic justice! what unidentifiable body parts!), to be... relieved.

'Not even Skaffen-Amtiskaw for a greeting party?' grumbled Zakalwe to the gleaming one-person module that had snuck itself into Lord Erinde's private garden. 'I must really be losing my touch.'

He got in. At the very least, this pickup'd paid enough attention to his file (or whatever they kept on him) that the seating was moulded right out of the walls. No chair in sight.

'Beam me up,' said Zakalwe as the module door shut behind him, just to be annoying.

* * *

He looked down as the module drifted up to its ship. The city wasn't burning, but he wondered: for how long more, that peace?

* * *

'So,' Zakalwe asked, legs propped up on a chair. He was in a private room somewhere safely ensconced in the bowels of his pickup; nevertheless, he was looking out at the system as it blipped by on the far wall.

Screens, he thought randomly to himself, _screens_. So much safer than fucking _windows_. Whoever'd dreamt up, in the distant past, that watching the stars beckon through _transparent plastics_ as you ascended up into the vacuum of hard space was a _good idea?_

'Yes, Zakalwe?' It was the _Title Still Pending_ , not that it mattered much to him. If they'd worked together before, Zakalwe didn't recall when.

He tilted his head up and back, and looked at the ceiling. A moot point, but it edged too close to feeling like he was talking to god when he tried speaking to the empty air. Talking _at_ god, though, while looking at some blank wall - that was a little easier on his belief system. 'Where's this thing going?' he asked.

'The Hyringigigigian Cluster,' said the ship. While Zakalwe wondered if they'd thrown that name together out of anthropological spite or if it was really what the locals called it, the ship elaborated, 'Or, if you want it laid out bare, B-139-99Z-YQ.'

'I'm shit at geography,' shrugged Zakalwe. 'Is it any interesting?'

'It's a cluster, Zakalwe. There are 13 systems in it, 7 of which have been contacted. Within the subset of contacted systems, there are 103 planets that have inhabitants with whom you could conceivably communicate: statistically speaking, _something_ _somewhere_ within the volume should be interesting. Of course, if you'd _define_ interesting, I could give you a better assessment, but-'

'What is it with you Contact ships?' he groused. 'I ask a simple question, I get a goddamned dossier for an answer.'

'I am not,' the ship said in a tone that Zakalwe supposed was meant to convey the impression of a metaphysical stick shoved firmly up a metaphysical ass, 'a _Contact_ ship.'

Zakalwe snorted. 'Yeah. Because they'd send a civ to come pick me up without Sma or her pet drone hanging off of me? I bet.'

'Paranoid, Zakalwe?'

'I lost you all once,' he grinned. ' _That's_ "interesting." Me losing you _twice_ , though, that'd be _embarrassing_.'

'We don't keep track of Culture citizens, you know. We don't tag people in their sleep, unless you count those who voluntary get implants, in which case-'

'Whoever said I was a citizen of the Culture?' Damning silence. Zakalwe rolled his eyes and waved a hand in the air. 'If you're going to argue semantics with me, at least give me somebody to yell at. Talking to a wall - that's a sure sign of insanity, someplace.'

'Hah,' said the ship, very quietly, and a second later there came a knock at his door. It opened on a young male child, skin baby-smooth and years from bread growth that'd never come for him. A solid imitation of humanity; a lot better than most of ships Zakalwe'd ever had the displeasure of travelling on.

Still, they never got the eyes right. Whether Minds did it on purpose or not was anybody's guess, but they could never manage _young_ , only _blank;_ those weren't the same thing.

'Ship Av Wei,' the kid said to Zakalwe, nodding once before settling into a chair across from him.

'Well, _Wei. Are_ we going anywhere interesting?'

'Like I said,' the Av - Wei - repeated. 'Possibly.'

'All right. If you're not my Contact contact, then who's my contact?'

'Perhaps your contact for Contact has yet to be determined by Contact.' Wei smiled. It was ugly, seeing an old smile on a young face, and it made Zakalwe vaguely uncomfortable.

He'd spent the last two years on Uematus VII, where Sma'd gussied him up as a bastard prince of the Low Demense. It'd resulted in far too much time spent indoors enrobed in far too much silk eating far too much rich food; the only comfort had been the reassuring predisposition of the other members of Lord Erinde's much-extended royal family towards murder, which dovetailed neatly with how badly the rest of the planet seemed to want to kill their kings. Coming onto the _Pending_ , it'd felt wrong not to need, at first go, a shower; Zakalwe hadn't even had a _tan,_ and there'd been no callouses on his fingers and palms to reassure him he wasn't turning into one of The Culture's scarless and smooth anti-eunuchs.

Wei tilted his head to his (it's?) side, inquiring. Zakalwe crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. Thinking was a dangerous thing. 'So what happens to me now, then?'

'Nothing, compared to what just happened to you _then_.' The ship Av inclined its head in the direction of the screen, back down towards Uematus VII.

Zakalwe was unimpressed. If the ship had wanted to make jokes about space-time, it should've picked up an astrophysicist.

It seemed to get the point. 'The answer is still, Mr. Zakalwe, _nothing_. If Contact - excuse me, _Special Circumstances_ \- doesn't need or want to debrief you, then you are, as you always have been, free to travel and do and be as you please.'

Zakalwe looked at the av for a long time. Long enough that a person would've been unnerved, but the av simply looked back at him until he said, 'What are you?'

'Excuse me?'

Zakalwe motioned with his fingers, stabbing at the air. 'What _are_ you? One of the little overpowered tugboats?' He pinched his thumb and forefinger close together. 'Or one of the big fuckers, the GSVs?' He held his hands wide apart.

'I'd point out,' Wei said, getting a little snippy, and wasn't that a sight for sore and tired eyes. 'That _form_ , in the case of ships, is usually but not _always_ a subset of _function_ , and we are always more inclined in the latter direction than we are taken to caring about the former.'

'Yes, maybe, but GSVs, they're like...' Zakalwe tapped the side of his head, trying to remember. 'What are those fish called?'

'There are a nearly uncountable number of fish-like species within just 10 systems of here,' Wei informed him, voice dripping acid. Zakalwe figured it didn't like being talked to, or about, like a specimen. Maybe Culture ships raised their Culture kids to ask no questions about the Culture.

'Seahorses, that's it. The ones that brood in their bellies, so they have to swell up in order to accommodate.' Zakalwe carved a balloon-like shape in the air. 'GSVs have to be formed that way, because that's part of their function. You can't separate the two, so if you're one thing, you _are_ one way, and if you're another thing, you're _that._ So which one are you?'

'If another picket ship ever heard you describe it as an _overpowered tugboat_ , Mr. Zakalwe, I despair to think of what would happen to you.'

Zakalwe grinned, and leaned forward until his elbows hit his knees. 'So you _are_ Contact, you little twerp. How many crew do you have on this thing? Ten? Five? Two? None?'

'I am not a tugboat,' said Wei, now especially bland. 'I am not little. And nobody said I was Contact.'

'Find me a ship that isn't Contact,' Zakalwe grinned, 'and I'll believe you.'

'Attempting to prove a negative is an exercise in futility; an exercise I have no desire to partake in.'

Zakalwe widened his eyes. 'So what you're saying is that you _can't_ prove to me that you're _not_ Contact?'

Wei stood up and frowned. Now that was a much better expression on the boy. 'In four of your days, we'll be coming up on Tarkin-THX. In four of your weeks, we'll be in Mos Deifsly. The itinerary from thereon out is less clear, but Mr. Zakalwe, believe me - you are free to leave whenever you please, wherever you choose to go.'

Because this was, after all, The Culture, the ship av sketched no bow, made no polite gesture before it left Zakalwe to his own devices. When rudeness really had no good definition, what was _politeness_?

'Well then,' Zakalwe pronounced to the screen. Uematus VII was already far gone, one insignificant pinprick dotted amidst the tattered blanket of space. 'Guess it's time for another vacation.'

* * *

He did try, before the four days were up, to contact Sma. It seemed to him that she was only ever around when things were _really bad_ , and this time the extraction from Uematus VII had been uneventful to the point of being downright boring. There _was_ a note - a little note that had been printed out, actually printed onto actual paper - but all it said was _Congratulations, Cheradenine, you deserve this - DS._

Deserve _what?_ To be ferried around god knows where by a prickly so-called picket ship? Zakalwe wished he could get the damned thing drunk; maybe they'd have more in common then.

A request to actually talk to Sma got him nothing but apologies: Sorry, Mr. Zakalwe, she's otherwise engaged somewhere three clusters over: if you want, I could drop you off with the  _To Be Continued_ , which will be heading in that direction in bit?

'By that point she'll be off saving someone, or something, else,' he dismissed the notion. 'Whatever, ship. Just drop me off at Tarkin.'

It made the words sound like _good riddance_. The feeling there, at least, was entirely mutual.

* * *

'Do you need anything before I put you down there?' asked the ship directly, no av in sight, a few hours before Zakalwe was due to be dropped off. He'd refused both terminal and drone escort, which had made the ship very nervous.

Zakalwe patted the bracelet on his off-hand. It contained one of those chips that galactic players pretended connected everything up; networks of trade and whatnot. How the Culture was supposed to play nice with a banking system was beyond him, but Zakalwe wasn't complaining. 'If this place is as hooked up as you say it is, it's not like money's going to be a problem, is it?'

'They're advanced enough not to need to bother,' muttered the ship. 'And yet they persist. Anyway - anything else, Mr. Zakalwe?'

He thought about it for a moment. 'A map,' he said. 'And make sure it's the right goddamned way up, please.'

* * *

As it turned out, he wasn't the only one getting deposited. Zakalwe hadn't even known there was another flesh-and-blood life form on the ship until he'd stepped inside the ship's module and found a twitchy looking academic sort clutching a reference screen.

'Hello,' said Zakalwe.

'Oh!' said the twitcher. 'There was someone else aboard?'

'Yes,' said Zakalwe, leaning against one of the walls. 'Me.'

'I didn't know,' said the twitcher. 'Amazing how fast these pickets go, isn't it?'

'Wouldn't know.' Zakalwe shrugged in lieu of adding _Also don't care._ Ships never did anything to _actively_ contribute on a combat zone - or at least the ones he got dropped into - so whether it took them one week or one year to get from point A to point B really didn't matter to him.

'From the Uematii to THX in just one - ' he used some unit of time Zakalwe was pretty sure was based on natural numbers and therefore totally useless to anyone with a brain not operating at light speed, '- is an astonishing feat of physics,' the twitcher tried to reassure him, then deflating when Zakalwe showed no interest in gushing alongside him. 'Ahem. Where are you headed?'

'Dunno,' Zakalwe said. 'About.'

'About where?'

'Don't know,' Zakalwe repeated. 'Why do you care?'

'It's just that not many Culture folk are interested in the cluster, and THX in particular. Nothing of cultural importance comes out of it, since their one major export is, well, you know.'

'Do I know?' asked Zakalwe. The man blinked. Zakalwe smiled, then threw him a bone. 'What cluster is this, anyway?'

The twitcher open and closed his mouth several times. 'The Lukas Cluster,' he said when he regained himself. 'Do you have _no_ idea where you are? _Or_ where you're going?'

'I'm here now,' Zakalwe pointed out, sensibly. 'I'll be down _there_ ,' he gestured downwards, 'soon.'

'Ah...'

'And I have a map. But you lot never get them right, so who knows how helpful it'll be.'

'Oh...?'

'What are _you_ doing here, anyway?'

'I'm a professor.'

'Of?'

'Geography...'

* * *

_Geography_ , he thought. Who cared about geography? There was what the Culture occasionally called _micro-geography_ , that small business of investigating the lay of an entire planet: its dips and valleys, its ways and means, all the things that made a place _a place._ But _they_ thought of geography as something much larger than that; for them, it was always interstellar geography, inter-system geography. Their net was cast so wide, stretched so far up and down and side-to-side that envisioning it was only ever an exercise in courting either a headache or serious case of existential insignificance.

Zakalwe supposed that was how they liked it. Maybe the Culture played their games because they thought they could tilt some universal balance; that they could make things _matter_ when, on a grand scheme, one sector of space - whether rescued from its own indignity or burnt down to the embers of war - factored not a whit in the greater calculation.

Maybe that's how they excused it, too: if anyone or anything Minds, Zakalwe supposed, could crunch the staggeringly huge numbers, think in logarithmic and exponential scale, divide by zero.

Geography, _hah_.

* * *

'You lot sure know how to show a person a good time,' Zakalwe said as the module took off into the distance. It'd dropped the geographer off first, and then taken Zakalwe off to another drop-off point where - according to the ship - things were "a little bit more interesting."

Zakalwe ran his hands over the tops of the neat and orderly rows of alien plants around him. That's all that there was - plants - and it went on, rank after rank, as far as the eye could see. There was so little in any direction that Zakalwe could almost see the curve of the planet.

 _It's a fucking corn field_ , he realised. _They put me in the middle of a fucking corn field._

He had a credit chip in his pocket that could buy worlds, and so instead of putting him in a whorehouse or a gambling den, they'd put him in a corn field. Typical. Zakalwe wondered, briefly, if it was because the Culture viewed anything outdated enough to still be considered a _moral_ vice as something that could be rescued from itself and elevated to the point of virtue: after all, _they_ needed neither prostitutes nor bookies, not when every obliging fellow citizen was friendly enough to jump into your bed while the next obliging fellow citizen took bets on how many orgasms you both could reach in an hour.

('Or maybe,' Sma'd said to him, much later, 'maybe we realise that you find most of that stuff _boring_. Uninteresting. Not real enough a ledge for you to feel _l'appel du vide_.')

Zakalwe tucked his hands into his pockets, picked a direction, and started to walk.

* * *

Considering he'd been put down in a farm that seemed to have truly planetary proportions, it didn't take Zakalwe long to run into the natives. He got about an hour or two into following some irrigation ditches when he drew up to a clean-shaven, check-all-the-boxes type pan-human local working on the watering systems.

''lo,' Zakalwe greeted.

The farmer stopped what he was doing, brushing his hands off and coming by. 'Hello. You're not from around here, are you?'

'No,' Zakalwe shook his head. 'I'm not.'

The farmer looked him up and down. 'My name is K'n'el,' he said, the name trailing off into a senseless jumble of consonants that Zakalwe was sure someone like Sma would love to untangle. The thought must have shown on his face; K'n'whatever finished with, 'But you can just call me Bob.'

* * *

Bob the farmer took Zakalwe on a tour. There wasn't much to it.

'The fields extend poleward until they get cut off by a major river system, and that's this sector's major export,' Bob explained as they trundled along in a bright yellow tractor. Zakalwe'd seen A.G. controls on the panel, so they could just as easily have been gliding above ground, but Bob seemed to enjoy the bumpiness of the ride.

'Major food source, is it?' Zakalwe asked, for lack of anything better to do.

'You could say that,' Bob said, which said nothing.

'Ah,' Zakalwe said, when no more was offered.

Bob smiled, and then drew the tractor up to the farmhouse that, finally, had gone from speck-in-the-distance an hour ago to a solid reality in front of them. To Zakalwe's eye, it wasn't lacking in amenities: whatever energy source they used here, it was small but powerful enough to remain sight-unseen whilst being plentifully available. The farmhouse, despite being a farmhouse, was as clean and well-outfitted as any Culture structure might've been, if the Culture'd ever got itself into architecture.

'Come in,' invited Bob. 'It's been a while since I had visitors, but the guest room is still all right.'

* * *

Bob lived alone.

'Most of us do, at some point in our lives,' he told Zakalwe. 'After a while you get tired of other people.'

'I can sympathise with that,' Zakalwe agreed over what counted for beer in this place. 'The rest of this planet this quiet too?'

'Without exception, yes.' Bob turned the mug he had around in his hands. They were a worker's hands: rough and lined and strong. 'We're not good at being adventurous.'

'Rubbish.'

With a small smile, Bob emptied his mug and then handed it over to Zakalwe, handle-first. 'Take that,' he said. Zakalwe took it. 'Now hit me.' To Zakalwe's raised eyebrow, he only added, 'As hard as you can, please.'

Zakalwe looked down at the mug in his hand. 'You know,' he told Bob. 'On some planets people pay a lot of money to do this kind of thing.'

'That would be rude of me. You're my guest - I insist.'

Zakalwe supposed that made sense, even though it didn't. 'If you say so,' he said, and swung the mug towards Bob's face as hard as he could.

The mug shattered; Bob barely moved. Shards of ceramic flew across the table they were seated at and plinked down onto the floor. If he ever managed to nick Bob, Zakalwe couldn't see it. 'Interesting,' he said, letting go of what remained of the mug handle. 'Fields?'

'Nothing that simple,' Bob shook his head. 'I imagine that if this came with an on/off switch, we'd fight and squabble as much as any other system. No - it's built in.'

'And nothing can touch you?'

'Almost nothing. None of the common stuff that gets thrown around, no.'

'May I?' Zakalwe dug into his pockets, and came up with a small knife. 'Call it professional curiosity.'

Bob shrugged, reached out with his hand, and wrapped his fingers around the knife blade. Zakalwe watched as he tightened his fist and twisted his wrist; the knife strained and strained and then snapped into two brittle halves.

'Hm,' said Zakalwe.

'Your _Title Still Pending_ told me you were coming to visit, Mr. Zakalwe,' Bob said, brushing up the pieces for disposal. 'I'm afraid that we might disappoint your professional curiosity entirely: we haven't had a war, or even a scuffle, in, oh, eight hundred years?'

'You'd think you'd fight more,' Zakalwe said, 'considering you're telling me your people are more or less impervious to harm.'

Bob shrugged. 'It's not ourselves we worry about: it's the property damage sustained by whatever's around us at the time.'

'So what do you lot _do_ , then?

'Oh. We farm.'

* * *

Since he was, after all, a visitor and a guest, Zakalwe woke up early the next morning and met Bob by the tractor.

'I know how to use my hands,' he said.

'All right,' Bob said. 'We'll start from field 4B.'

* * *

It was simple work with its own simple pleasures. Zakalwe bent his back and worked the soil and did what machines could not do and it felt, well, _good_. Bob talked to him; delivering whenever prompted a smooth, soothing monologue about weather conditions, crop cycles, seed stock, and a thousand other things that concerned farmers. Zakalwe got the impression that Bob would've quite liked to direct the movements of each individual earthworm tunnelling industriously below ground, but 'Some things you just have to let run their course, Mr. Zakalwe.'

He changed into the simple denims that Bob wore, and rolled up his sleeves and tied up his hair so that a tan beat itself back into his skin. Zakalwe felt his hands regain their customary roughness. When he went to bed at night, his head was empty as the night he gazed up at through the skylight in his room.

* * *

He'd intended to stay for a week or two: long enough to get the lay of the land, of Bob and Bob-type people. To his own surprise, he ended up staying the entire remainder of the season, watching as the young crop grew tall and sprouted ugly red ears of alien corn. Bob taught him how to use a threshing vehicle and Zakalwe went out and ploughed down rank and file and everything, and looked back at the fallen fields when he was done and looked at the red against the ground and, carefully, thought nothing of it.

* * *

They got to sorting and binding and so on; most of it was handled by a small army of drones and machines, but the final selection Bob wanted to do by hand. To Zakalwe's eye, it seemed as stupidly impossible as differentiating one grain of sand from any other.

'There's got to be a fucking tonne of this stuff in this one bin alone,' he said to Bob as Bob combed through the crop.

'Much more than a single tonne,' Bob corrected. 'We triple crop, too, and this is just the first season's haul.'

Zakalwe did some maths. 'What do you do with all the surplus?'

'Oh, surplus,' mused Bob. 'We have plenty of _that_. We... export it. Not as a food crop - not too many others, we've found, have digestive systems that can handle this, but...'

Zakalwe trailed his fingers through the sea of red. 'But?'

'We've found that other civilisations have certain uses for this once it's processed,' Bob said, looking a little chagrined. 'Now, since you're Culture it doesn't matter to _you_ -'

'I'm not Culture.'

'- you're Culture enough that your _body_ is,' Bob pointed out, and Zakalwe couldn't argue _that_. 'Which means it deals with certain kinds of radioactivity and radiation just as well, or better, than our own bodies do. So you've got nothing to be alarmed about, and - besides - the Culture hasn't used something as blunt as fissile material for military use in thousands of years; though by their word they haven't used _anything_ material for military use.'

It was the most Zakalwe had heard Bob say; _the lady_ , he thought, _doth protest too much._

'So what you're telling me,' he said slowly, 'is that you're growing and exporting radioactive corn.'

'It's not _corn_ ,' objected Bob.

' _Radioactive_ corn,' Zakalwe went on. 'That you lot go on to sell-'

'- _export_ -'

'- to whom?'

'One or two Clusters here and there, when the need arises...'

Zakalwe felt his fingers curl. 'And what do you think they use it for?'

'I'm sure some of them use it for powering those very old-fashioned reactors,' Bob smiled. He leaned in closer to Zakalwe, as if sharing a secret. 'Considering that _you_ are one of the Culture's most highly valued exports yourself...'

'Who told you that?' Zakalwe asked, and instead of a snarl it came out pleasant: a laugh. Because he could feel the angles starting to align; the blankness in his head was starting to clear away, like a fog parting.

'You know,' said Bob, thoughtfully. 'It wasn't the _Title Still Pending_ \- no, it was a drone, I think: said its name was... Skaffen-Amtiskaw?'

* * *

Zakalwe looked down from his vantage point in the module that'd come to pick him up. He didn't have a terminal, but it'd been easy enough to hail a ship down: the fields down below were burning, and in 4B there blazed a giant letter "Z."

'I'm fucking tired of vacation,' he said to no one in particular. Talking _at_ god, he reminded himself. Not _to_ him. 'Get me the hell out of here.'

To his surprise, a tall and skeletal creature morphed its way out of one of the module walls. It was matte and black all over and inhuman; inhuman except for its old, old eyes.

'Call me a tugboat,' said the ship - because this was not a fucking _av_ , no av was made to look like _this_ , like a weapon. 'And I'll throw you out into space and be half a system gone before you remember to scream.'

Zakalwe felt his mouth settle into a scar of a smile. 'Are you Contact?' he asked.

'Contact?' laughed the ship. 'Who cares about _Contact_?'

'A lot of your sort do,' Zakalwe said.

'Those who like to sleep soundly in their A.G. beds at night, I'm sure,' said the ship. 'With their eyes and ears plugged shut so that they never see anything that offends their charming sensibilities.'

Zakalwe ran his tongue over his teeth. The ship watched him, and he watched the ship. 'I'm Zakalwe. Cheradenine Zakalwe.'

'I know,' it said. 'I'm Demeisen. And this,' it said, as the module rose up into the dark underbelly of a ship, a real ship, 'is _Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints._ '

**Author's Note:**

> This one's Eccentric step-brother fic can be found over [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5518103), where Zakalwe picks up someone who'll make sure his cars blow up as (and when) he wants them to.


End file.
